


Compromise

by harperhug



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Captain America (Movies), Inhumans (Comics), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canon Divergence - Captain America: Civil War (Movie), F/F, F/M, Harm to Children, Human Experimentation, M/M, NaNoWriMo, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Politics, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-03
Updated: 2016-11-05
Packaged: 2018-08-28 19:33:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8460274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/harperhug/pseuds/harperhug
Summary: "While a great many people see you as heroes. There are some who would prefer the word 'vigilantes.'"The creation, and eventual dissolution, of the Accords.





	1. Post-Captain America

**Author's Note:**

  * For [evansscruff (chuckle123)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chuckle123/gifts).



> Birthday gift for gwaciechang.tumblr.com--lots of superheroes of colour taking charge, women superheroes actually doing things besides kissing.
> 
> Happy National Novel Writing Month 2016!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's strange, being fed and treated well when she hadn't completed her mission yet.

Maybe, if Natasha hadn’t spent the year honing her nurturing skills as Natalie Rushman thanks to Tony Stark’s downward spiral, she wouldn’t have acted the way she did. But that was only one way the story could’ve ended before it ever began. When the STRIKE team was first trying to dig Captain America out of the ice, Rollins’ scanner detected a faint heartbeat that he tried to snuff out with a bullet into Steve’s chest. He’d hoped he could cover up the wound with ice and claim it had always been there; after all, besides Peggy’s recording of Steve’s last words, no one knew what had happened on the Valkyrie. It would be perfectly reasonable for Steve to have kept quiet about having shot, knowing it would comfort no one to know he was a goner whether he crashed the plane or not.

But Steve, though alive, was comprised of frozen tissue—while each layer was easy to break by itself, several layers compressed were much more difficult. The shallow wound healed itself at some point during transport.

Otherwise, this story might have ended very differently.

* * *

“So Nick’s got you on babysitting duty?” Clint’s grin told her he found this hilarious.

Natasha barely bit back a groan as she shut her locker. “The doctor told him my wrist is going to take three weeks to heal, which _just so happens_ to be how long the World Security Council is meeting for.”

“Aww, come on, a bunch of bright-eyed kids? They’ll lift your spirits.”

“They’re not Kate and Barney,” Natasha grumbled. “They’re _politicians in training,_ if they’re not spoiled brats, they’ve been taught manipulation from birth.”

“Just give ‘em a glare,” said Clint, putting one foot on the bench to lace up his casual shoes. “They’ll fall in line.”

Natasha gave him a Look. “I’m not going to terrify small children, Barton.”

Clint’s eyes, shining with mirth, softened at everything she wasn’t saying. “I know, Nat,” he said with a warmth that made her throat close up. The ensuing silence should’ve been awkward, but it was comforting instead, right up until…

“If you do, can you take a picture of their faces?”

Natasha snatched Clint’s left shoe from his foot and ran away.

* * *

The vacation house had armed security guards from five different spy agencies forming a perimeter, guns pointed in what Natasha quickly grew to understand was the wrong direction. The noise from Rani Singh alone made Natasha consider defecting back to whatever remained of the Red Room.

“LET GO OF MY HAIR!” Rani struggled against whom Natasha assumed was the younger Yen daughter, Elizabeth.

“LET GO OF MY NAIL POLISH!” Elizabeth’s voice was no quieter despite her tiny body. Despite eyes so angry they were practically emitting sparks, Elizabeth had the appearance of an especially delicate bird. That was probably why Carter and James Hawley stood up and kept James Rockwell Jr. from shoving the toy cars they’d been playing with down her throat. In front of an ostentatiously-sized flatscreen television, Jackie Rockwell rolled her eyes at the argument and burrowed herself deeper into her couch cushion fort. Taking a leaf out of Jackie’s book, Natasha felt no shame in hiding in the kitchen at the opposite end of the house. The sounds of a chicken roasting in a roaring oven, which up until that point had been quite grating, was suddenly music to her ears.

“Okay, that’s enough,” Arya Singh pulled the girls apart with a strength that couldn’t possibly have been less than superhuman. “Rani, you know better than to touch things that aren’t yours. And for goodness’s sake, Yisuo, you can’t punch your way out of everything,” Arya sighed.

 “I don’t need to stop anything,” Yisuo glared as though the eighteen-year-old couldn’t snap her in half with a sneeze. “And stop calling me Little Righteousness!”

“You do need to stop fighting, no matter what your name is,” Natasha pulled back her sleeve so that the flexible wrist brace was visible. “Don’t think this means I can’t physically pull you two apart.”

Yisuo’s eyes widen at the sight, and she sputtered several English sentences before settling on, “你没有说你受伤了!” in a painfully-high screech.

Immediately, the kids scattered. Jackie disassembled the fort and placed the cushions back on the couch so the actual Elizabeth Yen could fluff them and steer Natasha onto the one with the best view of the television. Rani ran into the kitchen, where Arya had already taken over preparing dinner, and came back with a plastic baggie full of ice cubes. Carter picked his cars up off the floor while the Jameses grabbed dishes and started setting the table. Yisuo sat on the side of Natasha not currently occupied by Rani holding the ice pack against Natasha’s wrist, and used the same hands that had nearly clawed the girl’s eyes out to unscrew the top of her much-loved bottle of nail polish. Natasha felt a lump in her throat.

“How come she gets a manicure and I get a broken nose?” Rani whined.

“Ai ya, come on,” Yisuo scoffed. “If you hadn’t been a 小偷, I wouldn’t have punched you. And I didn’t break 你的鼻子.”

The peace didn’t last. Jackie and Carter began squabbling about which of his fathers’ old movies to watch first.

“ _Wargames_ is a classic!”

“Exactly, because everyone’s already seen it. Bet you no one else here’s seen _Chances Are_ ,” Jackie crossed her arms in front of her chest as only someone assured of her own victory could.

Natasha used her free hand to pinch the bridge of her nose, remembering too late that it was covered in wet nail polish. “Carter, Jackie,” she huffed out a disappointed sigh that was lost to Yisuo’s scream.

“CARTER REED HAWLEY AND JACKIE PHILLIPA ROCKWELL, YOU TWO SIT DOWN BEFORE YOU STRESS AUNT NATASHA MORE!”

_Aunt?_

A secret service agent poked his head in, finger on the trigger of the gun holstered to his hip. One glare from Rani sent him meekly closing the door and leaving again.

“It’s a Chinese honorific,” Elizabeth whispered reassuringly into Natasha’s ear, evidently misinterpreting the reason for her sudden shock. “We call every woman aunt if she’s respected, and you’re older than she is, I think, so you have to be respected.”

Natasha just barely gathered her wits together to offer a small smile.

“I’ve seen _Chances Are_ ,” Yisuo sat down beside Rani to begin painting Natasha’s other hand.

“See?” Carter pumped his fist in the air triumphantly. “I win.”

“I didn’t say you won,” Yisuo argued.

“Oh my god, Yisuo, not everything has to be a fight,” Elizabeth glared. “And you’re stressing Aunt Natasha out.”

Yisuo scowled at Elizabeth’s comment, but she settled down onto the couch in between Carter and Elizabeth to watch _Wargames_. Natasha kept her free hand in her lap, not only to keep the polish from smearing but also to keep it from shaking. Unfortunately, the hand in Rani’s grasp was trembling enough for the girl to notice, and even though it was impossible, Natasha thought she could feel the warmth of a pair of chapped lips through the wrapping on her wrist.

“There, all better,” Rani smiled before turning her attention to the television.

“Hey, James Junior,” Arya called, carrying the sizzling chicken to the dining table. “Please tell me your father stocks caramel corn.”

“By the truckload,” James Rockwell Jr. muttered, getting off the couch. He came back just as Matthew Broderick came on screen. “Didn’t Faiza have the biggest crush on him?” he asked, placing one large bucket on his lap.

Elizabeth brightened as she turned to Carter. “How’s your girlfriend doing these days? We haven’t talked since…I think November?”

“Yes, we broke up in November,” Carter lowered his eyes.

“I’m so sorry! Here,” Elizabeth reached into Jimmy’s bucket of popcorn and dumped the pieces into Carter’s outstretched hand.

“Thanks,” Carter said, eating just one and offering half to Yisuo, who did the same for Natasha with her palm held up, veins exposed and vulnerable. The owner kept her eyes on the screen, relaxed and not at all wary of the assassin sitting by her side. Natasha spent the rest of the movie slowly taking pieces from it and trying to swallow them around the lump in her throat.

* * *

 

The next day started off just fine. Yisuo and Rani thanked Natasha for their makeup sets, and were too busy with them to fight each other. The Jameses and Arya worked together to mostly remake a fancy dinner she had seen on a cooking channel a week before. Jackie and Carter easily agreed to watch _Wargames_ again. In hindsight, everything was going so well that Natasha probably should’ve thought twice before sampling the undercooked fish, or proclaiming it edible.

“This is awkward,” she said in between heaves, hunched over the toilet. Elizabeth had disappeared somewhere, but at least three of the Secret Service agents were following her, so Natasha wasn’t too worried.

“You weren’t around the year Carter tricked her,” Rani nodded to Yisuo, “into eating a cream trifle. This is nothing,” she gestured to the toilet.

“I’m lactose intolerant, so I threw up everywhere,” Yisuo said, eating cherries from a bowl she clutched around her middle. “I think I even got some on the crossed rifles over the fireplace.”

“You did,” Junior said witheringly. “Jackie had to sleep in my room for three days while Mom had the carpet torn up and replaced. We had to air out the living room for a week before anyone could enter it without throwing up themselves.”

Natasha started to laugh, but it quickly turned into a gag, then a heave, and she was once again vomiting into the toilet. Three pairs of hands held her hair back, and she couldn’t help but tense when one of them stroked her shoulder.

“Sorry,” Rani drew back and looked away from whatever expression was on Natasha’s face, which meant that the splotchy scar on her stomach was now visible to both girls.

“Ouch,” Yisuo was never one for tact. “Did you get shot?” she asked, dropping stem and stone of another cherry into her bowl.

“It’s a gunshot wound, an old one,” Natasha said, trying to gauge her reaction. It was either going to be pity or wariness, but Yisuo was a politician’s daughter so it was impossible to tell which one it was.

Yisuo opened and closed her mouth like she wanted to say something. The girl stood oddly, and it took Natasha a moment to recognize that her spine was curved. She immediately averted her eyes, trying not to look nosy.

“Do you want me to kiss it better?” Rani asked. Her tone was cheeky, but her eyes were focused on Yisuo’s discomfort.

Yisuo aimed the bowl’s contents at Rani and missed by a mile, but still prompted a round of enraged screeching that definitely didn’t help with Natasha’s headache.

“Arya, you need to pull Rani off before she breaks Yisuo’s ribs again,” Jackie shouted. “Sorry,” she started to close the door behind her. “They’re not always like this.”

“They _are_ always like this, or at least Miss Righteous is, the little shit,” Elizabeth ducked under Jackie’s arms with a large candle in each hand. She lined them on the rim of the sink, tore the wrapping off one, and let it fall to the floor where Natasha could see the label from a store not too far away.

“I heard that citrusy smells make you feel less nauseous. I don’t know if it’s just the placebo effect, but it works for me.” She pulled Jimmy’s engraved lighter out of her pocket and the room slowly filled with the scent of orange and ginger spice.

It took a few blinks before Natasha could see again.


	2. Pre-Avengers I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In retrospect, Natasha really shouldn't have trusted the STRIKE team.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please go back to the end of the first chapter, because I've added a section.

Jackie had already set up her couch with small fold-up wooden tables for each person to place their dinner by the time Natasha came by the next year, this time with considerably less grumbling and more than a little bit of eagerness. She was even able to put how much she wanted to meet the recently-thawed out Captain Rogers in the back of her mind.

“Yay! Movie-watching party!” Elizabeth threw herself on the couch as the intro screen started playing the theme music.

“Is that Tony Stark?” Jackie pointed at a fading picture.

“I think so,” Junior fumbled around the cushions. “Where’s the DVD cover?”

“Here,” Elizabeth picked it up from next to Rani’s feet and looked at the back. “Holy shit, it _is_ Tony Stark.”

Natasha grinned and sent Tony a Snapchat of the screen. Not even thirty seconds later, enough behind the scenes footage to keep them occupied for the rest of the three weeks somehow found its way directly into the DVD. The kids laughed delightedly until the television turned off.

Actually, everything was off: all the lights, the ceiling fan, the microwave oven, the goddamn air conditioning, everything.

“That’s not good,” Elizabeth, Junior, and Arya both moved so that their respective sisters were between their bodies and the couch while the Hawley twins huddled together.

“I know what you’re doing, I’m not a 笨蛋. And I can take care of myself,” Yisuo rose unsteadily and grabbed one of the little desks with a grunt of effort.

“Not stupid? Are we just going to forget the time you tried to impress Carter by-” Natasha never found out how Yisuo had embarrassed herself, because Elizabeth choked and grasped at something on her neck as she fell into Arya’s surprised arms. Natasha reached forward and pulled out a poison dart.

Arya pressed two hands to Elizabeth’s neck and sighed in relief. “She’s breathing.”

“STRIKE team, we are under attack,” Natasha said into the microphone on her lapel. “We have one injury in need of immediate medical attention. STRIKE, do you copy?” There was no answer, and the windows were too small for Natasha to see if there were any dark figures lying unconscious on the ground outside.

“Shit,” she fumbled under the couch for the gun she’d hidden there, cursing the darkness. Someone, probably James, used his phone for light, but Natasha immediately closed her hand over the screen. “It’s better to try to feel around in the dark,” she said warningly. “If you have your phone on you, don’t take it out. You might as well be holding homing beacons.”

“Shit,” Yisuo’s nervous twitter disguised the sound of someone creeping closer until a gunshot really did ring out and Rani fell down with a rapidly-fading scream that Arya echoed a second later as she knelt by her sister’s side.

Wood smacked hard into someone’s face, and Yisuo let out a little scream when her attack unbalanced her and she fell to the floor with a rustle of floral-patterned nylon. Something dark fell across the white linoleum and seemed to spread from one end—a nosebleed. The dark shape was moving, so Natasha fired at what she approximated was the goon’s head. The flash illuminated an incoming assailant at her three, and she fired again, hitting that one dead on just before the lights came back on to reveal a third and fourth man entering from the front door. Three had his head turned and never saw the bullet coming. Four did, but it didn’t help him at all.

Then the subject of Three’s interest took advantage of Natasha’s brief distraction to wrap his arm around Yisuo’s neck, a curved blade resting against the jugular. His free hand motioned for Natasha to drop her gun.

Natasha lowered her gun to the floor, already reaching for the Widow’s Bite hidden in the heel of her boot. When Five went down, Natasha nearly shot Yisuo’s ankles in shock, not because Carter had fired a perfect headshot, but because Yisuo had instinctively moved down with her would-be killer’s arms to make it easier to duck out of his slackening grip rather than up and getting crushed into the knife by the much larger man’s weight. Carter immediately dropped his gun and ran forward to hug Yisuo. He wasn’t shaking; this wasn’t the first time Carter Reed Hawley had killed a person. It couldn’t have been the first time Yisuo had been held hostage by a knife-wielder before either.

Natasha remembered her first undercover mission at the American embassy in Russia, where she’d been told to befriend a diplomat’s daughter and kill said diplomat. She had nearly decapitated the man with how hard she’d garroted him, and it was chalked up to underestimating her strength. But really, she’d just been jealous of the girl, living a life so soft that her major complaint was her father’s constant absence. But after the deed was done, she’d hidden in a vent and watched as the girl discovered her father’s body. Oh, there had been tears, but the first thing the diplomat’s daughter did was let out a loud, happy whoop the papers described as a scream.

Natasha wondered if _soft_ wasn’t just a better place to hide a sharp blade.

“No further threats in the house,” Jackie said, checking the security footage on her phone and making Natasha startle. “Wait, there’s a person in the oak tree by the west gate. Junior, can you take the shot?”

Her brother lined up his rifle, which Natasha had never even seen him fetch and _why was she the worst bodyguard ever_ and fired. A man’s scream cut out abruptly. Judging from the calm on Junior’s face, this wasn’t the first time he’d taken a life either.

“She’s alive,” Yisuo said, grabbing Elizabeth’s wrist to take her pulse. Her skin was still pale and gray, but her breathing sounded clear. Yisuo looked much worse, wincing from the force of her own shaking with her hair completely matted down by the blood and brain matter of her attacker. Behind her, Arya was kneeling in a puddle of Junior’s slacks, tying his belt just above Rani’s elbow. What remained of the forearm was hanging on by just a few sinews, while the bone had completely shattered.

“STRIKE team, do you copy?” Natasha said into her lapel again. If she could just get medical help, she wouldn’t be a complete failure of a bodyguard. “Rosebud needs immediate medical assistance.”

To her great relief, her earpiece buzzed. “This is Brock Rumlow. Something just knocked out all the power in DC, but I think we fixed it. Are you alright?”

Natasha repeated her instructions, abandoning her plans to call an ambulance herself when she saw NO SIGNAL flash on the screen.

“Mobile signal towers usually take five hours to start running again,” Carter said nervously. “I don’t think she has that long,” he looked at Rani.

“Fuck,” frightened and trying not to show it, Natasha focused on what she could do with the resources directly at hand. “Rumlow,” she said into her lapel. “I need you to bring every vehicle and every agent you can get a hold of right now. This is priority level one.”

“Are you out of you mind?” Rumlow snorted. “This is barely a three. Fury’s gonna have my head for this.”

“I’ll have your head if you don’t,” Natasha said. “Nick would at least give you a chance to explain yourself.” She watched Arya holding Rani’s only wrist in her hand to take her pulse. Yisuo was resting her ear against Elizabeth’s chest to hear her heart and feel her breathing. Carter had wrapped himself around Yisuo like a blanket. The Rockwell twins were gone, and Natasha noticed Jimmy scrubbing grayish matter off the floor next to a folded up desk.

It only took eight minutes for Tony to fly all the way from New York, which Natasha would rather undergo torture than admit had impressed her. In each hand were two metallic contraptions that Natasha did admit looked like coffins.

“They’re protective casings,” Tony said indignantly, gently laying Elizabeth down in one with Natasha’s help while Arya did the same for Rani in the other. “They’re Intelligent and Portable Ambulatory Devices, which I can’t call the IPAD because Steve Jobs is a dick.” Whatever they were called, Tony was able to attach one to each hand and fly off with them just as Arya picked up Yisuo, who sniffed, but otherwise didn’t protest being carried.

“How did you get here?” Arya asked Natasha once she had the small girl secured.

“I have a car,” Natasha was already shaking her head to reject Arya’s plan. “Listen, you can’t go out by yourself. Someone almost killed you tonight, and that was with all of us together.”

“She’s not going out by herself,” Carter lifted up one pant leg to show an ankle holster. “And yes, I do know how to use this.”

For the second time that night, Natasha was impressed. “Fine,” she said reluctantly. “But take Rumlow and Rollins with you, just in case.”

The house was unbearably silent with half the occupants gone. A corpse in each of the bathtubs to stave off decomposition in the hot summer night meant that Natasha couldn’t even shower to wash off the day’s work.

Surprisingly, it was the burly red-haired Junior who broke the tension.

“I’m going to take a page out of Rani’s book,” he turned to Natasha. “Will you read us a bedtime story?”

Natasha’s mind fizzled to a blank. “What?”

* * *

“Is it true?” surprisingly, Jimmy was the first to run into the room, waking up Yisuo and Carter. “Is it really self-repairing?”

“Yeah!” Rani gleefully bashed her new prosthetic against the wall behind her, succeeding only in making a hole in the plaster. “Oh, shit,” she covered her mouth as soon as the curse slipped out, turning to look at Arya, who was still fast asleep on her chair. “Well, anyway, if it gets bent or dented, there’s a little switch on the side here,” she fumbled around until she found the small blue button with an orange lightning bolt across the top, “and if you press it, it sends an electrical charge through the metal. I don’t know how it does that, but it’s not supposed to hurt because this thing blocks the electricity from reaching my skin.” There was a soft rubber seal across where her elbow used to be, the exact same color as the skin around it. Natasha made a mental note to send Stark a thank-you note.

“Who made it?” Jimmy sat down and started to stroke it.

Carter snickered. “You two want a minute alone?”

Rather than standing up and shouting at Carter to be nicer, Yisuo blushed and looked down at her shoes.

Rani swallowed before she beckoned Jimmy closer with a finger and whispered, “Tony Stark told me not to say.”

Jimmy’s jaw dropped. “You can’t serious!” he said in a breathy shout.

“Oh, I am! Look, he even signed the part where it attaches to my arm,” Rani twisted the piece of metal off her elbow with a snap, revealing the cartoon Iron Man was on the stump of her arm. The kids oohed and aahed appropriately, but Rani’s face fell when she saw Carter and Yisuo giggling at each other.

“We’re going to get food,” Carter said. “Enjoy your time alone,” he winked at Jimmy, who scowled and stuck out his tongue.

Natasha saw Nick Fury glaring behind the glass doors, clearly waiting for her. Slow with reluctance, she stood up and went to face her punishment for failing to watch out for her kids.

“I hear you were a real heroine last night,” he said instead.

“I-what-oh,” Natasha stopped speaking before she could continue to embarrass herself with her stammer.

The shadow in the corner of Fury’s mouth twitched, and when he saw that she had noticed, he gave up all pretense of being stern. “You know, they like you.”

“I let one of them get shot, and the other one’s still in the ICU.”

“Betsy Yen? She’ll survive. She’s the reason we have Project X.”

Natasha stopped in her tracks. “You had me babysit a reality-bender,” she stared at Fury in horror.

“She’s had her powers under control for years, Agent Romanoff.”

The fact that it was _Nick Fury_ saying that meant he had actually seen her in action at least once. “How long has she been working for SPEAR?” Natasha knew she was too demanding even as the sentence left her mouth.

“Her next mission marks seven years,” Nick said quietly.

Natasha did the calculations in her head. “I’m guessing she joined right after Yisuo’s diagnosis.”

Fury nodded. “Her Triple X Syndrome disqualified her out of the serum program.”

“Wait, Arya Singh was adopted that year,” Natasha paused. “And Carter Hawley was kidnapped on his way from school.” The pieces of the puzzle started clicking together.

“Don’t forget Rockwell losing her battle with ‘liver disease,’” Nick reminded her.

“They were offered up as pawns to get on the World Security Council,” Natasha crossed her arms. “Carter doesn’t have any special powers. Neither did Rachel, if a single poison capsule could kill her.”

“It didn’t work on him,” Fury answered. “That project was scrapped when it killed Rachel Rockwell.”

“No, it wasn’t. It was just changed from trying to make more Steves and Aryas into trying to make more Elizabeths.”

Fury scoffed. “I get enough of that from Rising Tide, I don’t need it from you,” he turned and walked away, pausing at the door. “They’ll see you next year.”

Natasha smiles, because for the first time in her life, she has a mission that’s about protecting life rather than taking one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time is going to be a mission, because I think I can still write action scenes.


End file.
